Chapter 101 — The Silly Roe Deer Scores Again!
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
After discovering that boiling water could not generate enough steam power, Gao Yang abandoned his plan to build the classic steam engine of Earth.
But that did not mean he had given up on his goal of building a universal, reliable, and simple power machine.
He still remembered how, in his home world, industrial mass production had swept away all inefficient modes of production—including the handicraft workshops—with the force of a landslide, and how roaring machines had dragged the whole of human civilization up from the soil and into the space age. In the factories, raw materials flowed into the workshops like water, and at the end of the machine clusters poured thousands upon thousands of products by the ton. The power of machines could completely transform the way a society operated; they could split mountains and shatter stone, they could fill seas and level plains, and they could be stronger, more precise, and more efficient than any single human being, never tiring—and it was precisely these traits, transcending those of natural humans, that embodied humanity's true strength.
That was the power of thought and creation.
Of course, Gao Yang was well aware of the side effects of industrial production—pollution, for instance, and the pressure that excessively high production efficiency put on natural resources. But problems could be solved, whereas survival brooked no negotiation. A person's illness could be cured, but if you refused to be reborn just to avoid getting sick, that would be unreasonable...
So whether it was to weather natural and man-made disasters—including the magic tide—or to make his own life in this backward world a little more comfortable, or to figure out the truth of this world, Gao Yang had to light up the tech tree. And to light up technology, the most fundamental thing to solve was the problem of power.
Steam propulsion was a dead end, but many of this world's rules in the macroscopic realm were still usable: gears worked, levers worked, waterwheels worked. And thanks to the power of magic, many technological developments that on Earth could not be skipped and required slow accumulation could here advance by leaps and bounds—such as the high-quality steel smelted through magical techniques, or the various alloys and crystals that differed from those on Earth yet possessed exceptionally superb properties. It was just that in this world, no one had fully discovered the uses of these things.
Or rather, the people of this world had indeed discovered the uses of these things along their own technological path—after all, otherworlders were no fools. It was only that, constrained by their worldview, it had never occurred to them to use these things in any other way.
Gao Yang looked at the cylinder structure on the blueprint. He had already crossed it out, and now he needed to think of a substitute to replace steam in powering the entire device.
What he could still think of was expansion doing work, or high-pressure airflow doing work—but where would these "sources of power," high in temperature and pressure, come from?
He had once thought that Rebecca crystal explosions were, put plainly, a kind of expansion. If properly harnessed, the power of an explosion was also a kind of motive force. The internal combustion engine on Earth was, in essence, a continuous "safe explosion" (deflagration) taking place inside a cylinder—so could the explosions caused by Rebecca crystals also be controlled and guided to become a driving force?
But after learning the principles behind those crystal explosions, he had been forced to abandon the idea.
Rebecca crystals, which used magic to produce explosions, were fundamentally different from the gunpowder of Earth, and the two "explosion" processes were utterly distinct.